Historians will have to study the impact of the 1956 October Revolution on the totalitarian empire in which Hungary was merely one of the fiefdoms, one of the “Peoples Democracies.” For many, Hungary was associated with the Rajk trial1. How can we assess the power of the chain reaction sparked by this new October if today, in 1976, Hungary is considered in Moscow to be one of the least viable “detachments” of the socialist camp, at a time when resistance in the USSR has reached the scale we know (becoming a factor that must now be considered in the European balance of power)?
Every morning, during my half-hour walk on the concreted area on the roof of the Lubyanka, I would watch pieces of burnt paper fly out of a chimney... The tasks of the historian and the judges will not be simple.
Will my story be useful to historians? The scattered memories of a teenager, a Parisian of the “White Guard” sort, who in 1948 found himself in Lenin’s homeland, Ulyanovsk. In 1952, against all odds, I became a student at a Moscow institute (the Stalinist apparatus was sometimes imperfect, even at the peak of its omnipotence). My subjectivity is undeniable: to what remained from my time at the Lycée Janson and the École Saint-Georges was added, in 1949, my father’s sentence of ten years in the camps for “collaboration with the international bourgeoisie” (he was a prisoner at Dachau, awarded the French Resistance Medal) from the age of fifteen, I naturally harbored a deliberate hatred for communism, a clear and thought-out revulsion. The deceitful concept of “Stalinism” seemed obvious to me. All of this defines my field of vision, guiding my gaze and my memory.
Public Reading
Spring 1956, Moscow, in one of the institute’s auditoriums. A lecture on dialectical materialism was on the schedule, but suddenly the dean of the faculty appears instead, a brochure with a red cover in his hands. The lecture, he announces, is being replaced by a reading of a secret document, the contents of which are not to be discussed. Taking notes is strictly forbidden.
The text is long student volunteers take turns reading. All the professors from the Department of Scientific Communism are present. The report is titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences.” At first, the readers’ voices are booming, with liturgical intonations, like Moscow Radio announcers. But gradually, their voices become indistinct and falter their faces turn pale and&hellip then red. By the end of the three-hour reading, several people have fainted. The dean leaves to return the brochure to the party committee, which will send it via armed courier to other institutions of higher education, scientific research institutes, design bureaus, and laboratories.
This is the final stage of a process that began on the day of Stalin’s death. Before that, there were various symptoms, many signals. Must I list them? The publication of Ehrenburg’s The Thaw—wags called the book The Slush—the light rectangular patches on the walls left behind by portraits of the Moustached One torn down during the night the appearance for sale of the magazine Poland, with its drawings that didn’t quite conform to socialist realism, and so on. In short, the communist faith was seriously, but not yet incurably, ill. Beria, its most skillful healer, was hastily eliminated by his own henchmen: they were not mistaken in fearing for their own well-being. The most plausible hypothesis: the Politburo thinks that a partial admission, the launch of Operation “Trust” (and what joy for a donkey to kick a dead lion!), would restore the former glory of the socialist utopia and bring the collective hypnosis back to life. Statistically, the calculation proves correct. And today the masses, whose condition Hedrick Smith2 described so well, never cease to lament wearily: “Oh, if only Lenin had lived just a few more years!”
Let us return to those listeners of the “Report” who had ears to hear. Let us leave aside those who, in their simple-heartedness, having overcome their fear, lost themselves in their usual apolitical stance—at once cynical and submissive—in exhausting poverty, or in alcohol. And, very significantly, let us not forget the Darwinian capacity for survival and self-restoration of the nomenklatura, or the precision of its choices when it comes to co-opting its own replacements. An important digression: the young Komsomol intelligentsia knew nothing of the scale of the Archipelago. They knew nothing about the camp uprisings long before the 20th Party Congress, or about the tanks that rolled over the prisoners of Norilsk, Vorkuta, and Karaganda (the same tanks as in Budapest and Prague). The June 17th uprising in East Berlin, labeled a “neo-Nazi provocation,” also went unnoticed.
Helping the kolkhozniks with the harvest, these young people, seeing the Egyptian slavery and poverty comparable to that of the poorest countries, thought: “We are helping the agricultural workers!”
From Revisionism to Resistance
The time between March and October 1956. Molotov’s removal on the eve of Tito’s visit. Kommunist, the monthly journal of the Central Committee, publishes a theoretical article by Kardelj3 on enterprise self-management. The myth of “communism with a human face” is born. Paradoxically, it is believed by young people searching for a unified Weltanschauung in the two extremes of the socialist camp: in Belgrade (self-management, almost no censorship) and in Beijing, where the garden of a “hundred flowers” was planted (the harvest would be reaped later, and what a harvest it would be!). The first rehabilitated prisoners are returning from the Gulag. Upon release, they are forced to sign a pledge not to disclose what they experienced. But they search for and find one another, and they begin to find listeners. Matisse and Cézanne return to their former places in the Pushkin Museum, from which they had been displaced by a permanent exhibition of gifts from the working people of the world for Comrade Stalin’s seventieth birthday.
An atmosphere of euphoria. But impatience is already breaking through the changes seem too slow. The will to think “realistically, like Lenin” grows ever more insistent. Foreign radio stations, until now the mouthpiece of American imperialism, become worthy if not of trust, then at least of careful listening.
The period from March to October 1956 was one of the most dangerous: it was the only real chance for the socialist utopia to survive in its “with a human face” modification. There is still a desire to hope—and people begin to rediscover the works of the young Marx, the last articles of Lenin... This is not even a Fronde, but a Reformation. It was natural to be tempted to trust the party’s collective leadership, which would not hide that it was itself searching for a way back to the “severity of Lenin and the cold purity of Dzerzhinsky.” At least, during this brief lull, no one, as far as I know, was arrested by the KGB for ideological reasons.
I spent late October and early November in the Baltic republics, where, thanks to my French roots, I was often the first Muscovite to cross the threshold of peoples homes. My Baltic hosts’ reactions and my own coincide. The radio is on constantly. We regain hope, our own hope. Poland was shaken. Now, the Hungarian earthquake. In Kaunas, on All Souls’ Day, the first mass demonstration takes place in the cemetery. Troops are brought into the city (two years later, I met one of the speakers in Dubravlag). From the BBC reports, we understand that something more than a cosmetic repair is happening. Finally, the people have risen up. On November 2nd, I see the tears of Lithuanians who have just served ten years in Siberia. What will follow seems clear to us. The tanks are not long in coming.
However, the purpose of these lines is to try to identify the origins of the resistance in the Russian metropole. The Politburo has pulled itself together. The people in the KGB now know what fate had been prepared for their Hungarian colleagues.
I see Agitprop lecturers, sent to the dormitory where I live, met with the audience’s silence. Theaters are showing a documentary about the horrors of the Hungarian counter-revolution. It is such a success that it is pulled from the screens ten days later. I met many people who went three or four times to admire the spectacle of the dismantling of the statue of “Iosif Gutalin” and to gaze with barely concealed pleasure at the defeated Chekists&hellip
The return to “normal life” is brutal. At a reception at the Chinese embassy, Khrushchev praises Stalin: “His mistakes should not overshadow his achievements in building a new society. He was a faithful and true Marxist-Leninist.”
The partocracy sensed that its very existence was under threat. In early ’57, a KGB directive is issued: do not let the people lose the Pavlovian reflex of salutary fear. Arrests and trials are needed in all cities, starting with the regional centers. As a result, the entire came to be represented in the contingent of zeks in the Mordovian camps. For several months, their population was reduced to a small number of actual war criminals and hundreds of those who had not yet been rehabilitated. The number of political prisoners will soon exceed fifteen thousand. The microcosm of the concentration camp was restored! I will share my prison memories. The KGB interrogator asked each of us the same question: “And in Budapest, on which side of the barricades would you have been?”
For the young intellectuals who found themselves at a crossroads, Hungary was a signal to act. Since their starting point was orthodox Marxism, this action was, naturally, revisionist, proletarian, Leninist, purifying, and anti-bureaucratic. The “Westernizers” of the good old Russian tradition were only a small fraction, with a bias, most likely, toward Americanophilia. Underground meetings, discussion circles (samizdat was not yet born), homemade leaflets. This is still a time of “oral agitation and propaganda.” For them, Budapest still represents Evil. To protect the country from this contagion, changes are needed.
Two representative groups: the Moscow group of Krasnopevtsev (researchers: historians, orientalists, engineers, Komsomol workers—about fifteen people), and the Leningrad group of Trofimov (writers, philologists&hellip). Distributing leaflets, attempting to establish contacts in factories, theoretical discussions, developing programs—the most liberal of which, and this was the extreme, were close to the social-communist program that, as we have the pleasure of seeing, is being proposed today, in 1976, in France! (In 1981, with the election of Mitterrand, the alliance of communists and socialists wins a long and destructive victory. — authors note) Simultaneously, national movements are reviving: Baltic, Ukrainian, Jewish, Armenian, along with Orthodox and Catholic proselytism. Individual actions: leaflets, letters to the authorities, attempts to organize strikes. Both of the aforementioned groups, Krasnopevtsev’s and Trofimov’s, unacquainted with each other, sing the Internationale after their sentences are read.
In the Gulag (1957)
On the night of August 25, 1957, the Lubyanka “invites me over”—for a reply published in Le Monde to the French writer Vercors, who, in his reports for this daily newspaper, had enthused about the new gardeners of the socialist paradise and persuaded his readers that this time, socialism with a human face—the very thing so long dreamed of—had arrived (and this after Budapest!).
The concentration of resistance members in the camps and their unification was a tragic mistake (I say this deliberately) on the part of Dzerzhinskys knights. We had finally come together. The Archipelago became our meeting place. Without Hungary, those dabbling in revisionism and even Trotskyism would have long continued to feel isolated.
Balts and Ukrainians tell us about their post-war partisan life, about wells that the MVD Internal Troops filled with children. Camp veterans recall torture and mass starvation Jehovahs Witnesses provide an example of active non-resistance repatriates and Soviet defectors abducted in Europe explain what freedom is a Catholic canon teaches a course on Thomist philosophy I am asked to recall the work of Camus. A series of punishments teaches us to identify the snitches a process of selection takes place among us. The camp is a school of silence and of the underground.
I maintain that from that “exclusive club,” which is what the Mordovian camps of the early sixties were, no one (with the rarest of exceptions) emerged a believer in the communist utopia. The proof of this is what followed. Behind the barbed wire of Sosnovka, in the hospital zone of Barashevo, under the watchtowers of Yavas, the human rights movement was born. Tolerance for those who believe or think differently was strictly learned (at first, ideological scuffles were not uncommon—I remember them because of an eyebrow ridge, split for lack of a better argument by a Leninist who is now considering emigration). October 23rd4 became a memorable date. The effect of the announcement in Pravda of Imre Nagy’s execution was enormous.
There were about thirty of us in a Stolypin car, being transported from Moscow to those places about which the prison saying goes: “He who hasnt been, will be he who has been, will not forget.” Among the passengers was a very young lad with a typically Russian, peasant face. We were telling our stories, and then it was his turn: he came from a remote little village and was made a tank gunner in the army. His regiment enters Budapest. The crew commander identifies a target and orders him to open fire. “Comrade Lieutenant, that’s a mistake. There are people in front of the store.” The order is repeated. Private Zhenya Milin, over the intercom, makes a humiliating remark about the officer’s mother. Ten years of a strict-regime camp for insubordination!
In the camp, he never once regretted what he had done he spoke only of his native village and didnt read newspapers. And he was not the only one.
This article was published in the journal Esprit, January 1977.